A risk-informed ship collision alert system: Framework and application

Ship collisions are rare occurrences with a potential to cause significant human, monetary and/or environmental loss. One element in preventing collision accidents is the presence of a collision alert system (CAS), providing warnings to ship crews and/or personnel in Vessel Traffic Services of the collision risk in a real-time operational environment. In risk research, there is a recent focus on foundational issues related to risk concepts, perspectives and methods for describing risk, with calls for work addressing these risk-theoretical issues in application areas. Despite several proposed applications for CAS, no frameworks covering these risk-theoretic issues have been presented. Hence, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, a framework for maritime risk-informed CAS (RICAS) is presented, including a risk-conceptual basis, a systematic description of the risk perspective and a discussion on the intended use of the risk model. A theoretical framework for the operationalization of the construct “ship collision risk” is presented, and a method for measuring this construct is introduced. Second, the framework is applied to a case-study concerning open sea navigation. An evaluation of the proposed RICAS in comparison with earlier proposed CAS methods indicates an improved performance over these.